I've said it before and I'll say it again: generally, it's fun when older music finds a new audience and/or is rediscovered thanks to a "Running Up That Hill"-level sync placement or viral TikTok trend, especially when we consider how much pressure active artists face to constantly churn out new music and remain relevant. Life cycles for new music releases can be perilously short, and the constant barrage of new content being fed to us by the algorithm can make it harder to discover the older material that is also at our fingertips via streaming.
Lorde has always taken her time making records. She may have lost a little momentum when 2021's Solar Power — the follow-up to her sophomore magnum opus, 2017's Melodrama — didn't manage to have the same level of resonance with her audience. It's not a bad album, and has several stunning moments ("The Man with the Axe," "Big Star"), but was intentionally designed to hit more like weed than the lovesick MDMA frenzy of Melo.
The pop star literally references the latter drug on "What Was That," the lead single from her upcoming fourth album Virgin, which has debuted on the Hot 100 at No. 36. More interestingly, though, a song from Lorde's 2013 debut, Pure Heroine, is also making a chart impact.
The beloved deep cut "Ribs" has debuted at No. 99 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart dated May 10, driven by five million official US streams — a 51 percent increase from the week previous, according to Luminate's data. Billboard reports that the song's resurgence can be traced back to Lorde's pop-up appearance in Washington Square Park to debut "What Was That" on April 23 — which fans made into a "Ribs" singalong moment when police forced the crowd to disperse before the artist showed up — and while this may have been the impetus, the song has since become synonymous with a TikTok trend called the Butterfly Effect.
Developed by meteorologist Edward Lorenz, the butterfly effect is an idea in chaos theory postulating that a change as small as the flap of a butterfly's wings to a complex system's initial conditions can result in drastically different outcomes for that system. This has largely been misinterpreted on TikTok, however, which is now populated with millions of videos annotated with statements like, "The butterfly effect is crazy because what if we had never miraculously matched on a dating app that we had both downloaded onto our phones and made accounts for," or whatever.
It's all very "woo-woo," as the kids would say, and has prompted much discussion about the opposite approach to finding love — by manifesting your perfect partner (equally woo-woo, if you ask me!) — as well as taking the opportunity to clown on people for thinking that deciding to get back with their ex is one of those butterfly wing-flap moments, and good samaritans trying to explain what the butterfly effect actually is. "Ribs" is soundtracking much of these revelations, which feels like a disservice to one of Lorde's best songs.
It was never a Pure Heroine single, and it was never meant to be. In retrospect, "Ribs" feels like a precursor to "Supercut," one of the many highlights from Melodrama and another prime example of the singer-songwriter's craft at its peak. She just so happened to be 16 when she wrote and co-produced the song with Joel Little, making it a unique portrait of preemptive nostalgia for a moment in time that, from an outsider's perspective hadn't yet dissipated.
But it had to Lorde. We all remember how hard being a teenager was (and godspeed to those bravely doing it today), and in this instance, she's stuck between chapters: memories of sharing beds and laughing as children, interspliced with scenes of spilled drinks and playing Broken Social Scene's "Lover's Spit" at the house party you threw while your parents were away.
Introduced by droning keys and a crescendo of clipped vocal layers before the thumping pulse and atmospherics straight out of a night-drive scene in a coming-of-age film kick in. Lorde repeats the same lines from the verse at nearly twice the tempo as a chorus with a restless urgency before being swallowed whole by the vocal stacks again, much like her overwhelming fear of getting old — which she didn't even have the foresight to know would include cringey TikToks about the stroke of fate that is one normie meeting another.
What was that, indeed.